cold and wrathful.

Composer: Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897)

Work: Andante from Piano Quartet Nr. 3 in C minor “Werther” (1875)

Performer: Derek Han, Isabelle Faust, Bruno Giuranna, Alain Meunier

Coats of some British and Icelandic sheep breeds:

• “You kiss the back of my legs and I want to cry. Only the sun has come this close, only the sun.”

— Shauna Barbosa, from “GPS” (*the* one)

• “I love you. I want us both to eat well.”

— Christopher Citro, “Our Beautiful Life When It’s Filled With Shrieks” (*the* one bis)

• “I have never known a closeness like that.”

— Anne Carson, from Nox (so like. ter)

• Frank O’Hara’s poetry in general

“I am always thinking of the moon rising / I am always thinking of you.”

“oh god it’s wonderful / to get out of bed / and drink too much coffee / and smoke too many cigarettes / and love you so much”

• some Richard Siken

“I'll give you my heart to make a place / for it to happen, evidence of a love that transcends hunger. / Is that too much to expect? That I would name the stars / for you?”

“I had a dream about you. We were in the gold room / where everyone finally gets what they want. / You said Tell me about your books, your visions made / of flesh and light and I said This is the Moon. This is / the Sun. Let me name the stars for you. Let me take you / there. The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar / cube… We were in the gold room where everyone / finally gets what they want, so I said What do you / want, sweetheart? and you said Kiss me.”

“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we’ll never get used to it.”

• Tara Skurtu, “Morning Love Poem”

• “There is too much or not enough / room in my stomach / for everything we will do to each other.”

— Adriana Cloud, from “Bento Body”

• Chen Chen, “Song of the Anti-Sisyphus”

• Kim Addonizio (!)

“Love me like a freezing shot of vodka, like pure agave, love me when you’re lonely, when we’re both too tired to speak, when you don’t believe in anything, listen, there isn’t anything, it doesn’t matter, lie down with me and close your eyes, the road curves here, I’m cranking up the radio and we’re going, we won’t turn back as long as you love me, as long as you keep on doing it exactly like that.”

“What happened, happened once. So now it’s best in memory—an orange he sliced: the skin unbroken, then the knife, the chilled wedge lifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thin membrane between us, the exquisite orange, tongue, orange, my nakedness and his, the way he pushed me up against the fridge— Now I get to feel his hands again, the kiss that didn’t last, but sent some neural twin flashing wildly through the cortex. Love’s merciless, the way it travels in and keeps emitting light. Beside the stove we ate an orange. And there were purple flowers on the table. And we still had hours.”

• Mikko Harvey, “For M”

• “Of all the things I have done, I am most proud of our relationship, of picking up the pieces of investing in each other again and again. I am proud to trust you, despite the pain of trusting that lives in me every day. In every way, I was raised to kill this: the impulse to build and protect a place where you and I can live as ourselves. And not just live. When I hear you on the phone, there’s always something else going on, something’s happened that will change you or change me, and it’s not those moments but ourselves that we share with each other. Not out of necessity, but abundance.”

— Yanyi, from The Year of Blue Water

• Ada Limón, “What I Didn’t Know Before”

• “So the season’s set us spinning again, with its new bite of breeze. Another year wound round us, and you still made for me. Last night I dreamt you were that gladiator we joke about in real life gleaming in black and gold light, pushing apart my thighs. It’s electric to think of it now, now that Brooklyn has closed down and I’m truly alone. I should write you all the time, tell you about this space inside me, like the hollow of a bell. But that’s not my gift. With you my gift is to live, live like this.

— Maggie Nelson, from “Birthday Poem”

• and last but not least

Samuel Beckett, ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces